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19 posts categorized "Books"

Nov 23, 2016

Three bad ideas ruin your ability to make cold calls: (1) Knocking on doors is morally wrong. (2) You're bad for doing it. (3) You are in grave danger.

From the introduction:

In 1942, Walter Cannon published an essay called, "Voodoo Death" in which he explained the cause of sudden death in the victims of curses. He researched all of the literature available at the time and came up with stories like these.

A young man in Africa eats a taboo chicken by mistake. When he finds out what he has done he begins to tremble with fear and dies in 24 hours.

A Maori woman eats fruit from a taboo place. When she realizes what she has done she dies the next day.

In Australia, when a witch doctor points a magic bone at a man the victim is immediately overwhelmed with fear. He becomes pale, he can't speak, he trembles and falls to the ground. When he recovers from the initial shock he goes to his hut and frets himself to death.

Cannon did not believe in magic or curses. He believed that these deaths were caused by the physical effects of panic and the panic was caused by "unrestricted imaginations" which told the victims that they were facing disaster when they weren't.

How does this relate to you and me?

Well, if you are afraid of making a cold call, you are like the man who dies from eating taboo chicken. There's nothing wrong with the chicken. There's something wrong with the man. He believes that he's being attacked by evil spirits when he isn't.

If you are afraid of making a cold call, you are like the man who collapses after the witch doctor points a bone at him. He believes the bone is going to kill him when it isn't.

In 1957, Curt Richter wrote a paper about sudden death in which he used his experiments with rats to explain Cannon's stories.

Richter restrained wild rats in order to trim their whiskers. When the rats realized that there was no hope of escape, they gave up fighting and would often simply die from the physical effects of extreme fear.

However, if he held the rats briefly and freed them a number of times, they learned that the situation was not hopeless. They could see that they were not going to be destroyed. Then, rats that would have died in another minute quickly become aggressive again. They were no longer so afraid of being held and showed no signs of giving up.

This resembles a story Cannon told about a man who had been boned by a witch doctor but had been quickly revived when the witch doctor was forced to remove the spell. Richter believed that something very similar was happening here.

And this book wants to do something similar for you. It tries to convince you that the witch doctor can't kill you so you can pick yourself off the floor and become aggressive again.

Here's a warning.

Behaviour change is unlikely so even if everything in this book is true it probably won't do much for you but it might be a fun read.

May 09, 2014

It's well-written and easy to read and I enjoyed her use of examples from her own life even though I can see that she's smarter than me so you might think that her example would not be applicable.

But that's the appeal of this book. She wants to tell me how to be like her. And what's she like? She's like a de-cluttering expert, a project manager who navigates her way through every challenge with a simple, structured approach and she wants to teach you to do the same.

If you're a confusenik that's a lot to ask but, you know, some people join a religion to learn a structured way of living so I'd say that this is getting off easy.

What impressed me the most? Well, Number 1 was The Personal Kanban. Johanna starts off the book with a long section on managing your work flow. I found that surprising but smart. She's concerned that in a state of desperation or shallow optimism you're going to set too high a goal and become discouraged when you fall behind.

Studies of willpower show that your ability to commit to a task is reduced when you are under stress and job hunts are stressful so it's very important that you moderate your pace in order to maintain it and, personally, I think there's great value in reducing your task size, limiting your work and doing the easy stuff first. And, if you don't believe me about willpower, google Roy Baumeister.

Number 2 was Knowing What You Like. Everyone is always stressing the importance of finding a company that is a good cultural fit for you but although lots of people talk about culture they are often quite vague about what it actually means.

Johanna isn't vague. She uses an analytic tool called The Career Line to help you figure out what you liked in the past and what you didn't and this information gives you questions to ask an interviewer to see if the company meets your needs.

Number 3 was Know What You Have To Offer. Moving on to self-presentation, Johanna insists that you have to know your value and she isn't talking about an exercise in ego enhancement. She means that you have to be prepared to explain every item on your resume and she's absolutely right.

I'm a recruiter and if I ask you a question about something you've listed on your resume, you'd better have a clear answer so, Johanna tells you how to analyze your work to draw out all of the relevant information.

Being able to tell a story about every project you worked on gives you something substantial to say in the interview. You don't want to overtalk but you don't want the interviewer to have to drag the relevant information out of you either. This advice might seem obvious but I interview recruiters about their best practices on my radio show every week and they have a lot of trouble telling me what they do on a daily basis because they haven't thought it through.

Number 4 was Networking. That's what Johanna calls real hands-on job hunting. She provides thorough instructions for working with social media but warns that sooner or later you will have to pick up the phone. I think it's important, therefore, to know how to sound good on voicemail so let me tell you my ideas about that.

No one feels like talking to a mumbler or dead fish so, if you're not used to introducing yourself, it helps to write a little script and practice saying it into your own voicemail 20 or 30 times. You record a 15-second message, listen to it, delete it, and do it again and again and again. Once the basics of your message become automatic, your presentation will sound more natural and you will be free to adlib whenever you want.

The fifth thing I liked was the discussion of Common Errors. Johanna ends the basic job search guide with a long section on the mistakes job hunters make. For instance, if a recruiter calls you out of the blue with a good job, you might feel torn by a commitment to your current company that your employer doesn't feel towards you. That's a serious issue that anyone who wants a progressive career is going to encounter.

The final chapter handles special circumstances for people who are very junior, very senior or who want to make a major change in their careers. She doesn't advise middle-aged people to dye their hair or hide the dates on their resume but offers more practical tips to deal with ageism.

All in all, the book is a good, up-to-date guide that I would recommend. Or, to put it another way, Johanna is a smart person, she's been around a long time and the book is a good opportunity to hang out with her.

Jul 12, 2009

David Perry is a super-recruiter. I met him a few years ago and was quite impressed. You can read about our meeting here. (For the duller among us, let me say now that some of it is a joke - but most of it is true).

At the time, David asked me to write a review for the first edition of Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters. I didn't want to but eventually I read it - twice - and gave it a rave review.

Then I started recommending it to job hunters. Most people didn't read it, I'm sure. They wanted me to find them a job. But one guy, Barry, got back to me and said, "I'm reading that book and what he says here about resumes is pretty ridiculous."

"Well," I said, "just ignore that part."

"But I don't agree with this and I don't agree with that either," he went on.

"Well," I said, "I don't agree with everything either. But look, for me, the guts of the book are the chapters on research. He tells you how to find companies to target, how to find out about them and how to make contact. It's good solid material. Why don't you focus on that?"

He didn't. And he didn't find a job. And he's someone who could have used a few guerrilla techniques because he was a nice guy, a smart guy, athletic and well-educated but he was sixty years old.

In person, he could have passed for 45 but on paper he was over the hill. What's more, he'd run his own company for 20 years and had a few short stays at other jobs as he tried to re-establish himself as an employee.

That said, when I started reading the second edition of David's book I had, at first, much the same reaction as Barry did a few years before.

I wasn't reading it from front to back. I just opened it up anywhere and the first thing I found, on page 280, was a section called The Killer Question.

Here, Dave tells you to ask the interviewer what the competitors are doing that keeps his company up at night and then call those competitors to ask for an interview and use the information you gathered in your first interview to impress them.

According to Dave, there's nothing wrong with this. The interviewer isn't your pal and he's not doing you any favours. The meeting was just a fact-finding mission for both parties and no commitments were involved.

That might be so but I would have to give it some thought because, to be honest, I was shocked and appalled but because I knew the author, I re-opened the book and started reading again.

This time, on page 139, I found Dave advising job hunters to start a blog. My initial reaction to this was negative, as well.

Every career counselor advises her readers to start a blog and it seems to be a mindless reflex action because starting a blog is not a practical tactic for most people.

It takes a lot of time and many people are not good writers and most of the time no one is interested in what they have to say.

The example given by Dave was unfair I thought because his sample blogger was a law student who had a passionate interest in Mixed Martial Arts. This made him the owner of some very unique expertise and he rapidly became known as someone who could discuss contract disputes in the MMA world in a professional
manner.

Still, I had to concede that blogs weren't entirely out of the question. I had urged Barry to start a blog many times. He wasn't working so he had the time to write and even if no one found him on Google when they searched "marketing communications" he would be able to use his blog to demonstrate his knowledge of his field to anyone who might be interested.

So I pressed on.

Next I came to advice about email marketing campaigns. Dave advises you to create a list of 20 companies you want to work for and email it to everyone you know asking if they know anyone who works in any of these firms.

You also ask them to pass the email on to a number of other people they know. I'd never thought of this and if you do it well it might get some results. He calls it the email chain letter and it's on page 221.

The next thing that caught my eye was Dave's advice to use numerals rather than words to represent numbers in your resume (page 116).

I'd always made a point of writing out numbers as words because it looked more formal and dignified but I also know how important it is to make your resume easy to grasp at a glance so he pretty well sold me on that right away.

I had a mixed response, however, to the section on "Warm Calling". Dave's warm call is just a cold call with another name. Even so, if and when you do have an opportunity to speak to someone -- on the phone or in a face to face interview -- his tip to be ready to ask a series of short, diagnostic questions could help you identify a need you might be able to fill (page 206).

So what am I saying here? That when you read this book you're bound to find things you don't like. Just like Barry and just like me. But don't forget the advice I gave to Barry.

David Perry is a very successful recruiter. And his book has a solid core of vital information based on his personal experience researching companies and marketing candidates to them.

Every page is loaded with ideas and there's 300 pages.

There's information that can only be of interest to wild men like Dave himself, a true guerrilla (see his profile in the Wall Street Journal) but it also has a ton of stuff for people who aren't interested in anything too audacious and want to do something more than just sit back and comb through the want ads.

So you could toss half of the book in the garbage and it would still be a bargain.

In fact, one of your problems might be that it presents more information than the average person knows how to manage. When there's so many suggestions how do you know where to focus?

My advice is to start with start with chapter 4. It tells you how to find companies to approach. Then read chapter 8 on networking. It tells you how to identify and reach the people you want to speak to in the target firms.

As you read these chapters and the rest of the book, simply ignore the stuff that doesn't appeal to you and explore the stuff that turns you on.

I also encourage people to read David's Guerrilla Job Hunting blog. It has a comment section in which you can pose questions to a very smart and friendly guy.

And, finally, I have to wonder about something. If the WSJ had published that profile of Dave six years earlier, in September 2001, George Bush might have hired him to find Osama and history would have been very different.

May 10, 2007

I'm a fan of The Brazen Careerist. I found her blog last October via a link by Louise Fletcher and enjoyed it so much that I started reading through her archive which contained a lot of funny, interesting stories about her family and work life.

I read about her experience in the dust storm following the collapse of the the World Trade Center. I laughed at her critique of impractical honesty and winced when she hired then fired her new step-sister.

I have her book on order and I'm hoping that she didn't follow her editor's advice to cut down on her personal stories because they're so good and well-written that they make her practical advice significant whether you agree with it or not.

May 08, 2007

Jason von Alba at JibberJobber.com reviews Penelope Trunk's new book and provides links to other reviews.

von Alba's review is well written but quirky in the way it moves in for the attack and then cancels it every time.

this book is a must read. I found myself shaking my head a number of times saying “no way, it’s not like that” only to give in and agree with her.... Like me, you’ll probably shake your head as much as you nod your head as you read this, but you can’t really argue with much of the stuff that’s in here.

One has to wonder what issues he struggled with because he doesn't say. So, listen here, von Alba, when my book comes out (Don't Call Us, We'll Call You: Job-Hunting For the Mediocre) I want you to say what you don't like in the most blunt, straightforward manner.